You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.
-Attributed to Abraham Lincoln.
This week, when a Tea Party member shouted a question to President Obama during a stop during his currentMidwestbus tour, asking the President how he can call for more civility in the political area when “your Vice President is calling people like me, a Tea Party member, a ‘terrorist.'” The President responded by saying that a discussion “wouldn’t work “if you just stand up when I asked everybody to raise their hand. … I didn’t see you. I wasn’t avoiding you… Please.” After answering another person’s question, Obama then responded to the frustrated Tea Party member by saying “First of all, in fairness to this gentleman who raised a question, I absolutely agree that everybody needs to try to tone down the rhetoric. In fairness, since I’ve been called a Socialist who wasn’t born in this country, who is destroying America and taking away its freedoms because I passed a health care bill, I’m all for lowering the rhetoric.”
So let’s examine the question: Is President Obama a Socialist? First of all, I do not think being called a Socialist is a pejorative. Socialism is a social-political ideology, not an insult. If you take the opposite ideology, Capitalism, and call me a Capitalist, I would not consider that an insult. If you look at the President’s background and his past associations and views, I would venture to say you couldn’t come to any other conclusion than the President believes in Socialist ideology. When he was a young man living in Hawaiiin the 1970’s, he had a relationship with a man whom he described as his mentor. In his best selling autobiography Dreams From My Father, he refers to him repeatedly as just “Frank.” Recently it was revealed that the“Frank” he refers to was Frank Marshall Davis.
Frank Marshall Davis
Mr. Davis was a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), as well as a published radical and poet. The FBI had a large file on him for his subversive activities and for his association with the CPUSA, who at that time had strong ties to the Soviet Union. In Dreams From My Father, Obama recalls a conversation with him a few days before he left Hawaii for college, where Davis called higher education “an advanced degree in compromise” and warned Obama not to forget his “people.” When the President arrived at college, he seemed to take Davis’ advice to heart. As he writes in Dreams:
“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists.”
Most of us have had associations in our youth we wish we hadn’t and have left those associations behind as we’ve matured. However, the President has kept these associations into mid life. The President has been consistently backed by Socialist groups since 1996, when he received the backing and full endorsement of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in his Illinois State Senate Race – an endorsement, to my knowledge, Obama never rejected. Even at the start of his first run for public office and his entrance into the public arena, Illinois State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a group of liberal supporters in home of two well- known figures with well-known radical Marxist William Ayers and the 1960’s radical bomber Bernardine Dohrn. I cannot believe that Obama was unaware of this at the time.
Let’s look more recently at Obama’s views on the Constitution. In a well-known and published public radio interview in 2001, State Senator Obama made the following statement:
“But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.
And that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court-focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.” (Public Broadcasting WBEZ-FM in 2001).
The President believes that one of the failures of the Constitution is that it has never ventured into the redistribution of wealth to the poor and underprivileged. He essentially believes that the Federal Government can grant rights to its citizens, which is fundamentally against the beliefs of our founding fathers. Our founders believed that a person’s basic rights come not from the government, but from basic humanity granted by his/her Creator. These inalienable rights (inalienable means not transferrable to another or capable of being repudiated) of “Life, Libertyand Pursuit of Happiness” as declared in the Declaration of Independence are granted by the Creator and not by the government, and therefore cannot be taken away by any government. The Constitution was meant to be a stagnant document and Obama thinks it should be a transformational one. It tells the government what powers it has and limits it to those powers, but Obama thinks it should evolve with the needs (or desires) of the government to control the governed. This is the root of the President’s apparent disdain for the 9th and 10th amendments, in particular.
I personally think that the President is a Socialist, but I do not hold that against him. What I do hold against him and a big portion of both the Democratic and Republican Parties, not being upfront and admitting their true beliefs. If the President and those who believe in centralized power of the Federal Government were to openly campaign for changing the Constitution directly through the means provided by our founders (through the amendment or article 5 convention process), I would respect them for being intellectually honest. I would, of course, with all my might peacefully fight against them through the political process to avoid the destruction of our Republic. But the proponents of both the far left and right always use stealth to hide their real intentions. They know that the vast majority of American citizens love personal freedom and choice that the Constitution ensures that it is followed. Unfortunately, the American people in the last 80 years have been made ignorant of the Constitution by governmental education dominated by progressives in both parties. The main goal of the Progressives is to make the Constitution irrelevant by either neglect or by stretching its true meaning beyond its original meaning. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and I hope that Americans will demand that those who lobby for fundamental change do so in the daylight.
Just my Opinion –D.B.
Associate Member Online News Association 2011-2014 http://journalists.org/